Start Blogging Today With These WordPress Tips

Have you ever wanted to start your own blog? Do you worry that the software is just too difficult to use? This is far from true. By using WordPress to blog, almost anyone can start their own blog within a few minutes. Keep reading to learn more about this powerful program.

Create smart URLs! Don’t use a lot of keywords in the URL, and keep the whole thing simple and straightforward. Avoid excessive verbiage. You want to create smart permalinks that are easy to look at and easy to understand. This helps make your blog more user friendly and comprehensible.

Make the most of your titles and your descriptions. Any time you share posts on social media sites a description and title may be required. These are important in terms of good search engine optimization, so don’t just toss out titles and descriptions in a random fashion. Give it some thought and optimize with good keywords.

When you are done with your site, check out how it looks from a visitors standpoint. Did you get across everything that you wanted? Go to your site from someone else’s computer to get their point of view and write down the changes that you will need to make to continually improve the aesthetics.

If you don’t like your theme, change it! There are thousands of free themes available online which allow you to quickly and easily change the look of your site without having to know much about HTML coding. Be sure to choose themes from reputable sites to ensure they don’t affect the security of your software.

Having a theme for your WordPress site can make it much more professional. There are plenty of websites that allow you to download themes for free. However, it is very important that you download themes from a trusted source. Not doing so can result in you installing outdated or malicious codes.

Control unruly spam not by turning off comments, but by installing the right plugin. Aksimet’s anti-spam plugin is exceptional at keeping your site on the up and up. You can also add Recaptcha which adds a captcha to the comments box on your site, ensuring no bots can leave a message.

Don’t forget to spellcheck your WordPress story. WordPress makes that easy through a spellcheck button on the editor itself. Look for a button that has the letters “ABC” on it. It’ll then scan your post for spelling and common grammatical errors. Check any word or phrase that has a red squiggly line under it.

If you upload changes to your WordPress site, but they don’t appear to have taken effect, try to refresh from a clear cache. Hold shift as you click the reload icon in your browser, or hold shift-ctrl-r at the same time. This will give you a clean version of your site which should be updated.

Your WordPress is nothing without plugins, and lucky for you, there are plenty to choose from. However, it is very important that you use caution when installing plugins and keep in mind that they aren’t disposable. You can uninstall them, but most of the time they will still affect your content and leave shortcodes behind.

Don’t install more plugins than you need. It can be very tempting and exciting to download as many as possible, but doing so will burden your site with a lengthy load time. This means that the site will run slower for both you and your readers, and worse, it can make an negative impact on your search engine ranking. Websites that load slowly do not fare as well in the ranks as those that are optimized efficiently.

Some visitors may want to share one of your posts with friends or family members through their email. Unless you have a plugin in specifically for that purpose, the user may not find the process very easy. Therefore, install one ahead of time so that your visitors are not frustrated.

When searching for plugins, check user reviews prior to selecting any. Keep in mind that everyone who can code can create plugins. You do not want to use a plugin that has many reported bugs and flaws. A plugin with many downloads and a high rating is usually a safe one to use.

A great commenting plugin that is useful for WordPress is Disqus. This free commenting system works well with its API. You have the ability to import and back up your comments with it. It also adds essential SEO to your comments so that the search engines can index them easier.

Your first WordPress plugin install should be Jetpack. The plugin extends the usability of WordPress in a lot of important ways. For instance, it gives you some basic analytics on the main page of the dashboard. It also increases your social media options for your website and adds in contact form options.

The plugin Broken Link Checker makes finding broken links on your site an easy task. Why don’t you want broken links? They make your content appear dated, and that can lose your reader’s interest. When you update or remove broken links, they’ll never realize how old your posts might be.

If you aren’t into getting comments on your WordPress blog, you can turn comments off on any individual post or page. This is an excellent solution if you are creating more of a promotional website rather than a personal blog. WIth the comments off, you can solely concentrate on your post content without worry of spam.

If you would like to try something on your website and test some things without going live, make a copy of your blog in another folder with an identical, second database. This can keep mistakes you could make from harming your site.

Now that you have read this article, you can see just how easy it is to start blogging with WordPress. If you want, you can start your own blog within just a few minutes. Once you master the basics of WordPress, you can start to share your writing with the whole world.